The Right Kind of Currency

I came home Sunday morning, after my bi-weekly 8-mile jaunt around Bayou Texar, & proceeded to ditch my dripping wet running shorts, socks & shoes on the shoe rack & hangers in my back yard. As I opened the back storm door, there was a whirrr & a blur of feathers off to the left at about the height of my head. A bird house which hung off one of our loblolly pine trees since we moved into the house five years ago had fallen in one of the hurricanes we had in the year after our arrival. Because of the fall, it's structural integrity wasn't the greatest; the floor was about half attached. We had it sitting on a metal outdoor shelf for a while wondering what to do with it. It still kind of looked cute, so we hung it up near our kitchen window about three months ago, about the same time we started putting up our patio roof. After the Close Encounter of the Avian Kind, I realized the birdhouse was no longer just a decoration. The bottom of the birdhouse was crammed with pine needles. Obviously, some bird couple has decided to take up residence there. My wife, ever the cautious one, wondered whether we should try to repair the house and re-hang it. However, I'm more than willing to hold off until I know for certain the house has been vacated. Hey, I wouldn't want someone to come in & redecorate (or screw up) my place while I was out, Home & Garden Network be d*mned.

"Life is a budget." - Patricia Quigley, Ph.D., ARNP, CCRN (during aerobics class, ca. 1993)

The quote above probably has never been used in a book, or directly attributed, but I definitely have to give credit where credit is due. Dr. Q is probably one of the main reasons I went to college, developed an interest in fitness, and began working as a coach. During the mid-1990s she saw me in various states of fatigue, dehydration & under-nourishment, & rescued me during one of my more acute crash-and-burn exercise moments, which turned me on to the benefits of sports nutrition.

It's also a great quote when I think about fatigue, stress, work, training. Especially when I'm laying out training plans for my athletes. Like the first principle of economics says, we have unlimited desires but limited resources. There's only so much you can do given time constraints, energy limitations, & multiple task demands. Professional athletes are blessed with not only the gifts of efficient energy distribution, but with the opportunities to efficiently reacquire the energies previously distributed. The rest of us citizens juggle that 40-hour (or more) work week, (seemingly unlimited) needs of family & home, & in many cases, determine if we can be involved in other activities.

By determining how much time do I have to train, runners can make a simple (well, perhaps not so simple) determination of what race distances to focus on. I've seen more than my share of miserable, beat-up marathoners who probably would be happier half-ers...or 10-kilometer runners. Triathletes are even more budget-constrained than the average runner; hard-won performance gains in one of the three disciplines often come at a cost to the other two...regardless of the distance. Lately, I've started to learn you need the right kind of currency to spend in this market.

Ever spend time in a foreign country but didn't have access to their money, and all you had were dollars? Okay, maybe that's not such a good analogy; flip it around. Ever come back from a foreign country to the States, and all you had in your wallet was their folding money? Especially in this town, where people tend to not think about international travel, going into a Starbucks for a latte and trying to pay with 15 UAE dirhams (1 UAE dirham = $.27) is a very bad idea.

'What's this? Monopoly money?'

Your next cup of coffee will be at the Pensacola Police Department, while you're answering a series of questions. Beginning of a very bad day.

While coffee & pastries might work as good fuel for a 40-year-old 5K/10K specialist, it's not quite as effective when the goal is 70.3, or 140.6 miles. I guess you can do it, but it's not good fuel. From all of the people I've ever talked to who have done long-distance triathlon, they have not agreed with the marketing which states America Runs (or Tris) on Dunkin'. Well, Michael Lovato might be an exception.

That same sort of diet (or rest, or beverage...more on that in the future) discipline - or the lack of - is like having a birdhouse with a half-nailed-in floor; it's a matter of when - not if - the bottom will fall out...and you hope you don't have your eggs in there when it does happen. I approach these currency exchanges of a sort with a little bit of fear & trepidation...some 200-plus days out from Ironman Florida.
So it wasn't too surprising to hear my wife's girlfriend complain about her dietary hassles over the past weeks. She has a love, like I do, for sweet things & junk food. Since my wife is more into savory, salty snacks, the odds of having lots of cookies, cakes, pastries & the like around the house are slim. Not that I don't love pretzels or popcorn, it's just gummi bears are higher on my list of favorite food-like substances which must be avoided like the plague so I can hear Mike Reilly shout my name on November 7, 2009. Blessed be my wife, for she has turned me on to sports nutrition bars, namely CLIF bars.

I tried to explain the benefits of CLIF bars to my wife's girlfriend:
1. There are multiple flavors.
2. They have a cookie-like texture.
3. They are made of mostly-organic stuff.

4. The large bars are 200 calories; the new mini-bars are 100.

So, with items like CLIF bar, a person in need to be wise with their diet, or lose a couple of pounds...like me, for performance & health reasons...can exchange the unhealthy stuff they love to scarf on at the office (where I can find whatever I am looking for) or at home with what can best be described as an eighty-percent solution. It's not a chocolate chip cookie or a brownie, but it's close enough for government work. The grains, natural fiber, flavor variety & portion control make it the folding money I can use for my own personal fitness & dietary budget.

Post-Race Criticality and Holistic Dieting

I managed to get through one of my target (preparation, really) races with only a few minor aches, pains, & disappointments. The goal was (in reality) to finish in the top 500, which earns you a numbered lithograph poster. When there are 20,000 participants & 3,000 racers, finishing in the 200s isn't so bad. It's when you start getting critical & crunching the performance numbers things appear disappointing: Compared to last year I finished about 70 places farther back in the pack, & 90 seconds slower.

After a disappointing race you have two choices:

1. You can whine & complain about how you're out of shape, you suck bilge, & so on, or

2. You can look at the factors...

a. ...under your control which you could have changed,

b. ...out of your hands which you could not...

...and then go back out & train. I prefer to do the latter. Of course, you can always blame factors which had nothing to do with a bad day. Lots of folks do. But if you look realistically at the things which can be improved & do something about it, y'know...things might improve.

It's like, for example, someone who complains about their weight. My wife & I had a great chat about this during our Sunday morning stroll. She knows people who complain about the need to lose a few pounds. When she recommends they get out to walk or jog more often than twenty minutes a day, three times a week, most of them look at her as though she had an eggplant growing out of her head. Or, she'll receive what might be better known as the litany of obstacles. It's the 'I can't do that because...' song.

Hey, we all know the tune. We just need to stop singing it.

We had a perfectly decent fitness gym membership until a couple of months ago, but couldn't get our workouts to fit within their operating hours. My wife was visiting a tanning salon near our house which had a 24-hour gym facility; she said, 'I like the other gym, but it's too far from the house for me to go before or after work. If we transferred to this one I could walk or bike over during the work day, or the middle of the evening.'

Personally, I don't care how she gets her exercise; I know she's happier when she gets it. Well worth the extra dollars in my humble opinion. Bottom line: You will spend your time, money & energy on what takes your highest priority.

We also talked about diet. For me, it's an athlete's equation:

Calories Out - Calories In = Change In Weight.

However, I came to a revelation this weekend. Diet is a holistic thing. Dealing with what calories you take in is not the only part of the equation; you also have to look at the mental & spiritual "thing." If you are happy with your body habitus - if your doctor has not said you are at risk for all those things which can hurt you indirectly caused by having too much weight on your body - you don't have to be so anal about what you take into your body. Get out & do something active every day; don't eat to excess.

But, if you're not happy with the way you look, I suggest you take a closer look at the magazines you read, the people with whom you spend your time, the television programs you watch. I would make a wager the persons who are the least happy with their body are the ones who spend the most time/effort/income purchasing & reading tabloid magazines like People, Us, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan (okay, there are dude versions of those rags, too...), watching Lifetime, E!, & so on. The more time you spend pumping mental & emotional junk food into your brain & psyche, the more likely you are to compare yourself to the people who pay fitness trainers & coaches to help them stay in shape because they want to remain in their careers & make money. These are people who, if you spent enough time with them, you would find out are more screwed up than you could ever be on a bad day.

And if you don't believe me, I have one word for you: Brangelina.

Now, think about the amount of time you spend reading the mags & watching the programs. I bet if you took the time/money per week pushing that garbage into yourself you could get in one extra good workout or pay for that trainer/coach, who will give you the (gentle, but often necessary) kick in the butt your training regimen needs.

I remember reading an interview with Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers some time back. He was talking about how he prepared to go into the studio & record, or write music (okay, you might not like their opus, but their cover of Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground is nearly as funky as the original), saying something to the extent of: '...if there are people out there who are going to wear down my spirit or cause me to be upset, I'll avoid them. I learned about it from Robert DeNiro, who did the same thing when he prepared for a movie role. So now, if I know there's a billboard ahead I don't want to see, I'll make certain to avoid it on the drive.' The very same thing is necessary in our own lives; negative people will cause you to look at yourself in light of your failures, your shortcomings, & what they see needs to be changed...which, in many cases, is perfectly fine, thankyouverymuch.

We are not only what we eat, but what we take in & who we let in.